If you have noticed I’m not tweeting or replying to your tweets, it’s because I can’t. Hopefully this situation is temporary, because Twitter is my favorite social media platform and I would certainly miss my daily interactions with friends there.

For now, I’ve found the silver lining in not obsessively checking my Twitter feed.

Interacting more with people in meat space and refocusing on work is always a good thing. Also, I hope to blog here more and will continue to do my podcast.

I might be suspended from Twitter, but I’m not suspended from the Internet. Yet.

This episode is on Dataminr, a New York-based startup, which is authorized to analyze the entire Twitter “Firehose” of all live tweets and offer clients advanced social media analytics as a service in the form of digests and news updates.

Exclusive access to information and data feeds, which include Twitter’s raw live tweets, allows Dataminr to filter the data to identify important events and business trends as they unfold and also act as an early warning system for major events like terrorist attacks, natural disasters and other public emergencies.

Dataminr is Twitter’s only data partner that is also allowed to resell the complete stream of tweets and their clients include large hedge funds, mainstream news outlets, public relations firms, publicly traded corporations and major government entities including, law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The DHS, FBI, and CIA have used the service to help with tracking criminals and terrorists, but have also drawn the ire of the ACLU, who have challenged the use of Dataminr’s services by government agencies to monitor domestic protests.

This episode breaks down last week’s online Q & A between Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and infamous NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden on Periscope. The event, promoted by the organizers of the campaign Pardon Snowden, featured a lengthy discussion on privacy and the role of social media in sharing user data with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Jacob Young – who submitted a question to Snowden and had it answered, sorta.

The event also included questions from Twitter users. Jacob Young, a software engineer and privacy advocate, was one of the lucky users who submitted a question and had it answered by Snowden during the event. Jacob joins the podcast to give his reaction to Snowden’s answer to his question and also shares his thoughts on mass surveillance, privacy and more.